Well, we continue to monitor the pipeline that we have in our LiveCycle business and as you know, given last quarter was our traditional fourth quarter that tends to be the peak for most enterprise businesses, to give you a little bit more insight, the government was a huge vertical for us in 2008 and we saw quite a bit of growth, both at the federal and national level, as well as the U.S. state and local level. Manufacturing continued to do well for us and we actually turned in better-than-expected performance, even in our financial services sector, because of our ability to help firms, protect revenue streams, and drive cost. As Mark said in his prepared remarks, we expect to see that sequentially decline because that’s what typically happens with the enterprise business in Q1. But given the large available market opportunity and the maturity that we now have in our sales force, we would hope to see that continue to grow in the future.
Blair Abernethy - Thomas Weisel Partners
Okay, and have you seen any change in the life of the selling cycle or even deal sizes in that segment?
Shantanu Narayen
Not particularly, not things that I would call out. Frankly I think what we are seeing is more awareness of the fact that engagement applications and providing the kinds of user experiences that our technology allows people to produce, is becoming more important and so we are seeing more awareness of the category and what LiveCycle produces, offset by what is happening in the economy. So I would say it is sort of been a net zero and clearly our sales force has been doing a better job, given the tough economic environment.
Blair Abernethy - Thomas Weisel Partners
Okay, great. Thanks very much.
Shantanu Narayen
Thank you all again for joining us today, I mean, in summary, when we look at 2008, we think that in a tough economic environment, we achieved both our revenue as well as our profitability goals and more important, we put the company in a very strong position as it relates to the focus on Flash platform, the Creative Suite and Acrobat business and as we said, we think 2009 will be a tough market. We’ve already taken the actions in place to help us through this tough economic climate and we continue to be really positive about the long-term prospects for the company and we are confident that as we emerge from this economic climate, that Adobe will be in a stronger position than ever before and we look forward to sharing more at our next earnings call.
Mike Saviage
And this concludes our call today and thanks, everybody, for joining us.
Operator
Thank you everyone. That does conclude today’s conference. You may now disconnect. |